We know they drink Budweiser and Sauza and take pain relievers – maybe for hangovers. They smoke Marlboro Lights, snack on Hostess cupcakes and chug Gatorade. They wear military camouflage and wash their clothes with a powdered blue detergent. They put on protective masks when they spray pesticides.

They live next to a boulder on a mountain in the wilderness, packing in supplies, tending their crops. They’ve planted a little corn, but that’s just for munching. The irrigation pipes webbing the slopes supply a network of almost 20,000 marijuana plants, turning them a vivid green hue rare for mid-summer in the dry and desolate wilderness of Los Padres National Forest.

It was that telltale green that alerted Monterey County Sheriff’s Deputy Robert Gonzalez as he cruised the hills in a National Guard helicopter, following up a tip. A nearby landowner, coming across a trail he didn’t recognize, had called the sheriff’s department to report his suspicions.

Gonzalez led a law enforcement team – four others from the county and a Seaside cop – on a long, hot hike to the pot garden in early August. The camp was still functional, but the growers had bailed. Gonzalez and his team hacked down the immature plants and chopped up the irrigation line, leaving most of it on the ground. They also left heaps of the growers’ trash and roughly 30 acres of fouled-up habitat in an area that’s supposed to be one of America’s last pristine places. Federal law defines wilderness as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

About three weeks later, Gonzalez and two other officers who’d busted the operation escort me to the site to check out the damage. I’ve heard horror stories about criminal cartels tearing up and trashing the land, and I want to see if it’s really as bad as all that.

We hike along a low creek, where a small turtle swims in the clear green water; past tufts of scrub oak, where wild boar and deer amble; and up a dry hillside striped red with manzanita. A huge slab of granite shaped like a T-bone hugs the opposite slope of the canyon, its smoothness emphasized by the brush around it.

After hiking for about an hour, we come upon a tangle of dismembered irrigation pipe and hacked-up dry husks on the dirt. A blue-bellied lizard scuttles across our path. This, Gonzalez tells me, is the site.

The difference between this area and the surrounding land is subtle at first glance but dramatic upon closer inspection. The brush has been cleared from the hillside, and in its place irrigation piping snakes to a series of pits where the ganja had been planted. The dry earth is loose and eroding. Trash pocks the landscape: stuffed Wal-Mart bags under boulders, plastic wrappers stuck in branches, containers of gardening chemicals tossed onto the dirt.   

At the base of a wind-sculpted rock wall: a Mazola corn oil bottle, several varieties of fertilizer packaging, a Marlboro Lights carton, a canvas duffel bag, a can of chili con carne. Under a manzanita: a slippery pile of plastic baggies, a coiled irrigation pipe, an empty water bottle, a nappy sweatshirt. Perched between the branches of a madrone tree, a gas mask. A stone’s throw away, a canister of gopher killer.

The three goateed cops lounge in the shade of a giant boulder at the growers’ main camp, cracking jokes and offering commentary as I take inventory of the trash left behind. I feel like an amateur anthropologist. Hmm – the growers heat food and water with these three propane tanks. Someone has a big foot to fit into that tennis shoe. They eat Spam, drink cheap beer and tequila, smoke lots of cigarettes. What do they do with this car battery? What do they listen to with these headphones dangling from a tree branch?

“This is a nice place for a camp,” says Seaside Police Officer Gabe Anderson, the shyest of my escorts. “If it wasn’t all trashed up, I would come camping here.”

Sheriff’s Detective Mark Caldwell gets a little more worked up. “This is not the guy growing six plants in his closet because he’s got cancer. This is on the same level as cocaine or meth,” he says, feet planted wide. “This has nothin’ to do with medicine. This is dope money.”

He shifts, gripping the muzzle of the M-16 slung over his shoulder. “Them comin’ in and tearin’ up our land, that’s bullshit.”

After busting the operation, the cops had only packed out the material they wanted as evidence, Caldwell says. It’s not that the junk doesn’t bother them; it’s just not their job to clean it up.

Gonzalez, as the head of the County of Monterey Marijuana Eradication Team – its only member, actually, since the department re-assigned his partner and declared COMMET a one-man job – is charged with finding the dope and leading the eradication. The work is primarily funded by a federal grant that is usually renewed every year, but it isn’t guaranteed. “Obviously we have to do something to earn it,” Gonzalez says. “We have to produce marijuana.”

State officers with the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP) sometimes come along to help. But their focus is also on pot removal, not cleanup, says Cmdr. Michael Johnston.

Before the Iraq War, Caldwell says, the National Guard had more helicopters available to haul out trash. But when cops have to hike for hours to a site in hot, dry weather, sweating in heavy camo and packing weapons, the last thing they want to deal with is cleanup. Some of them may carry out a little trash, but most of it stays at the site. “It’s not something that’s our priority,” Gonzalez says.

In the end, responsibility for the mess falls in the lap of the US Forest Service, which is charged with protecting natural resources in the 2-million-acre Los Padres National Forest. But the agency is too cash-strapped and short-staffed to do a complete cleanup, and no one’s specifically assigned to the task, says Los Padres Patrol Capt. Ray Gould.

“Sometimes a year goes by, or more, before we can go into the sites and actually clean them up,” Gould says. “I would say we don’t have a protocol for cleanup. The priority is to get the marijuana out.”

And even if they do haul out the trash, Forest Service staff can’t even begin to get to the task of landscape restoration. “Zero on that,” Gould admits.